Libya’s civil war has placed the Uan Muhuggiag mummy at risk. But negotiations are underway to transport the rare artifact from Libya to Rome, where it will undergo restoration and scientific analysis

Libya’s National Museum announced earlier this year that it would reopen for the first time since the fall of Muammar el-Qaddafi, the country’s deposed dictator, in 2011. The plan was to welcome visitors back to newly renovated galleries filled with hundreds of ancient artifacts.

But a recent surge of violence in Libya’s capital, Tripoli, has forced officials to postpone the reopening indefinitely, though they say the museum still intends to welcome visitors once the security situation improves.

Of the artifacts awaiting the public, none is more poignant than the roughly 5,400-year-old Uan Muhuggiag mummy, a fragile centerpiece that has borne the toll of war, neglect and underfunding.

“It was a breathtaking discovery,” says Savino di Lernia, an archaeologist at Sapienza University of Rome and one of the few researchers to study the remains in recent decades. “But it’s a shame—such an absolute tragedy—that it was not properly protected.”

Efforts to restore the damaged mummy have gained new momentum over the past few months. Still, to understand how such a significant artifact ended up in this vulnerable position, one must return to a dusty rock shelter in the Libyan desert, where an Italian archaeologist made the find of a lifetime.

View of the Tadrart Acacus mountains Courtesy of Amr Fathallah

A bundle in the sand

When Fabrizio Mori set out in the Sahara in the 1950s, his aim was to document prehistoric rock art, not to unearth one of the oldest preserved bodies on the African continent.

Founded by Mori in 1955, the Archaeological Mission in the Sahara initially focused on the dramatic, weather-worn shelters of the Tadrart Acacus mountains in southwestern Libya. For years, Mori was content recording the mysterious figures and graffiti carved and painted onto cave walls, tracing the stories of a long-forgotten people. Then he changed course.

On the fourth expedition, in 1959, Mori brought in a broader team of researchers, including Angelo Pasa, a geologist known for his work at archaeological sites across Italy. Mori had begun to suspect that the Libyan rock art was not the whole story, that beneath the caves, in the ground itself, there might be something more.

The researchers began excavating at Uan Muhuggiag, a rock shelter tucked into the Tashwinat Valley, in Fezzan, in southwestern Libya. There, in the quiet of the trench, they found what looked at first like a decaying bundle covered with plant leaves. When they lifted the bundle from the dirt, they realized the supposed leaves were actually animal skin. Inside was the mummified body of a small child, curled on its right side, a string of ostrich eggshell beads around its neck.

An archival photo of Fabrizio Mori photographing a site in the Tadrart Acacus mountains Fabrizio Mori Archives

The location of the burial site, at the very bottom of the shelter, told Mori that this discovery was ancient. He called on local Tuareg guides, long his collaborators in the desert, to help him transport the remains. According to di Lernia, they built a wooden crate for the journey. For ten days, camels carried the child’s body across the sands toward Ghat, in southwestern Libya, where the team waited for the necessary permits from Tripoli authorities.

After a few weeks, the mummy was flown to the Italian capital and delivered to the anthropology museum at the University of Rome. Mori understood that the find was exceptional. He enlisted the help of Antonio Ascenzi, a leading expert in paleopathology (the study of ancient diseases), to analyze the remains.

Radiocarbon tests dated the burial to around 3400 B.C.E. The child probably lived during a vastly different era in North African history, when the Sahara experienced what scientists call the African Humid Period, in which the now-barren desert teemed with lakes, grasslands and wildlife. Pastoral communities thrived in this green landscape, herding cattle.

“This mummy represents a rudimentary but exceptional form of mummification by Neolithic pastoralists,” di Lernia says. “The Sahara’s extreme aridity helped preserve it for over 5,000 years.”

Archaeologist Fabrizio Mori points to an elephant carving on a rock in the Tadrart Acacus mountains. Mario Verin

The child died around the age of 2 and a half. A deliberate incision in the abdomen suggested that the organs had been removed. The chest and belly had been filled with a reddish-brown pigment. No resin or bitumen was present, as in later embalming traditions, yet the level of preservation was remarkable.

The mummification technique used on the Uan Muhuggiag child was certainly advanced considering the time frame, says Joann Fletcher, an Egyptologist at the University of York, in England. “Often, cultures described inaccurately as ‘primitive’ practiced advanced forms of mummification and funerary treatment,” she explains.

Long before the pharaohs

Researchers have noticed striking similarities between the Uan Muhuggiag child and Egyptian mummification practices. Both cultures placed their dead in fetal positions, used ostrich eggshell beads as jewelry and removed internal organs to prevent decay. But the Egyptians didn’t start removing organs until around 2600 B.C.E., some 800 years after this Saharan child was mummified.

“There’s still a lot of misunderstanding about mummification,” Fletcher says. “It was long believed that ancient Egyptians were the only people in the ancient world to practice mummification during the Bronze Age, but that’s completely wrong. Many peoples of the ancient world practiced mummification during the Bronze Age—including Libya, with the Uan Muhuggiag mummy—as we also know from our work in the Levant and Yemen.”

The long incision on the child’s body was likely made to remove the thoracic and abdominal organs, a practice that would later be mirrored in Egyptian mummification. The cavity was filled with a light, porous mass of black mold, possibly mixed with plant seeds. Fletcher notes, however, that this material was never analyzed, or at least that no such testing has been documented.

An illustration of the Opening of the Mouth ceremony being performed on an ancient Egyptian mummy Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

She points to similar practices between roughly 1000 and 300 B.C.E. in ancient Yemen, where bodies were eviscerated, filled with local plant materials and wrapped in animal hides. In one case, the body was wrapped in linen, a practice similar to that of the Egyptians, suggesting a potential exchange of information and practices through trade between the two peoples.

“All Egyptian mummies I have studied were wrapped in locally made linen, often painted with imported pine resins and beeswax,” Fletcher says. “The Uan Muhuggiag mummy, like most Yemeni examples, was wrapped in animal hide.”

Libyan antiquities expert Ramadan al-Shaibani sees even deeper connections. “There’s a theory that desert dwellers knew mummification first and then transmitted it to ancient Egypt, which later refined it,” he says.

Shaibani cites Libyan rock art depicting Anubis, the jackal-headed god associated with mummification, at sites that predate the deity’s earliest known appearances in the Nile Valley, during Egypt’s predynastic period (roughly 6000 to 3150 B.C.E.). These inscriptions portray the god as a human figure with a dog’s head or wearing a dog-shaped mask. According to Shaibani, the rock art’s presence in the Libyan desert suggests that concepts of body preservation might have developed in the Sahara before influencing practices along the Nile.

Fletcher also acknowledges strong evidence of cultural links between Neolithic Saharan civilizations and ancient Egypt. Early Egyptians, like their ancient counterparts in what is now Libya, raised and venerated cattle in a savanna-like environment that was more fertile than it is today.

“These strong cultural connections can be observed from the very beginnings of Egypt’s long history and continued for thousands of years, right up to the time of Cleopatra, with Egyptian-style burials found in Cyrenaica [in Libya] and other parts of North Africa in the late first century B.C.E.,” she says.

“When I visited the mummy at the National Museum in 1999, all that remained were the skull, spine, ribs and scattered limb bones,” says archaeologist Savino di Lernia. Courtesy of Amr Fathallah

The question of social status remains a point of debate among researchers. Fletcher and her colleagues at the University of York believe that the nomadic pastoralists had elite classes: “We think it is quite likely that the [Uan Muhuggiag] child may have been part of an elite group who had the means and expertise to preserve the body, which would also have been very light and portable,” she explains. “And we do suspect rather more of these same elite would have been mummified too.”

Di Lernia holds a different view. He suggests that this Saharan pastoral society was more egalitarian, and that the child’s family was not necessarily more powerful or wealthy than others.

“Regardless of the society’s social structure, the burial at Uan Muhuggiag appears to have received special care,” di Lernia says. “This is evident in the presence of grave goods, such as a necklace, and the use of a leather pouch to contain the body, perhaps a reflection of the child’s young age at death.”

A slow decay

Today, the Uan Muhuggiag mummy lies in Libya’s National Museum, awaiting the Tripoli cultural institution’s long-delayed reopening. But the child whose body endured for 5,400 years in pristine condition has not weathered the modern era well.

“When I visited the mummy at the National Museum in 1999, all that remained were the skull, spine, ribs and scattered limb bones,” di Lernia recalls. “The necklace of ostrich eggshell beads around its neck had dwindled to just three surviving beads, though photographs from Mori’s original excavation show the necklace completely intact.”

Fabrizio Mori with the Tuareg guides who accompanied him on all his expeditions to the Tadrart Acacus mountains Mario Verin

Shaibani attributes the decay to years of improper storage: Most of “the world’s mummies are preserved in special containers, sterile and vacuum-sealed, under ideal temperature and humidity conditions,” he says. “Unfortunately, the Uan Muhuggiag child never received such care over the past four decades, and we lack specialists trained to handle organic remains, like mummies.”

Libya’s 2011 revolution and subsequent civil war catastrophically worsened the situation. As the country’s electrical grid collapsed amid ongoing conflict, Tripoli’s museum suffered prolonged power outages, especially during the summer months. The central air-conditioning would shut down for hours, sometimes days, exposing the ancient remains to Libya’s brutal heat and humidity fluctuations.

Di Lernia has long called for an international rescue mission to salvage the mummy, engaging for years in discussions with Libyan antiquities authorities. Yet he has seen little tangible progress or commitment from the government to advance the effort.

Despite the mummy’s deteriorated state, hope may finally be emerging. Di Lernia and Mohamed al-Shakshouki, the current head of Libya’s Department of Antiquities, have reached an understanding that could lead to the mummy’s transfer to Rome for restoration and advanced scientific analysis.

The initiative has backing from Sapienza University and the Italian archaeological mission in Libya. The missing piece is funding—a chronic problem for Libyan archaeology.

In 2024, the Department of Antiquities received just 38.7 million Libyan dinars (roughly $7.1 million), representing a mere 0.03 percent of the national budget. With more than 95 percent earmarked for salaries, virtually nothing remains for excavation or conservation.

A drawing of hunters pursuing an inbex, discovered by the Mori expedition on a rock in the Tadrart Acacus mountains Mario Verin

“Di Lernia has been relentless in trying to save the mummy,” Shaibani says. “He even secured funding from the Italian oil company Eni and sent around 70 emails to the former department head between 2011 and 2012. But there was no response from the Libyan side.”

Now, with new Libyan leadership and renewed international interest, the rescue mission might finally proceed. The proposed research would employ cutting-edge, noninvasive techniques that could revolutionize scholars’ understanding of prehistoric North Africa.

“With just half of one tooth, we could extract ancient DNA,” di Lernia says. “That would enable full genomic analysis to trace the population history of the Sahara and compare it to other burial sites discovered in the Acacus Mountains and the surrounding desert over the past 70 years.”

Such research could illuminate the Neolithic peoples who inhabited the vast expanse of modern-day southern Libya, possibly reshaping the story of mummification itself.

When Libya’s National Museum finally reopens, the Uan Muhuggiag mummy will be displayed in a small glass case cushioned with white cotton. Visitors will see the scattered remnants of what was once a perfectly preserved testament to ancient ingenuity.

“The initial analysis of this mummy transformed our understanding of prehistoric North Africa,” Shaibani says. “Imagine what new revelations could emerge with modern technology.”

The fate of Africa’s oldest mummy, and of the revolutionary insights it might still yield, hangs in the balance between a remarkable past and an uncertain future. In the race to preserve what remains of this ancient child, the world watches to see whether modern science can salvage the secrets that war and neglect have nearly destroyed.

“We must do everything in our power to recover what remains, if not for scientific value, then simply out of human decency,” Shaibani says. “After all, this was a child, a human being, not just an archaeological artifact.”

The Uan Muhuggiag mummy has remained largely out of the public eye, like so much of Libya’s archaeological wealth. But it survives—delicate, damaged and still waiting, like the museum it’s housed in, for a more stable time.

This article is published in collaboration with Egab, a network that empowers local journalists in the Middle East and Africa to publish stories in international media outlets.